


as all women fall

by queenbaskerville



Category: Vis a Vis | Locked In (Spain TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon Muslim Character, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Motherhood, One Shot, POV Second Person, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25626859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenbaskerville/pseuds/queenbaskerville
Summary: You’d steal your daughter the sky if that was an option.
Relationships: Zulema Zahir & Fátima Amir, Zulema Zahir/Macarena Ferreiro
Comments: 14
Kudos: 33





	as all women fall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PeridotQueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeridotQueen/gifts).



> title is a quote from Camille Norton: “I fell obscurely into my body / as all women fall when they are wild, feral. / We fought. We turned the sheets red / from the wounds. / We were untamable. / We must have died then. / We didn’t know how not to.”

When it comes to your daughter, you want a lot of things. You want her to stay with you. You want your mother to stay away from her. You want to be allowed to hold her for a little longer. You want to be allowed to name her. You’d give her a good name. You know what you’d call her. Your mother names her instead and calls her Fátima. 

You sing because it forces you to breathe. It’s the only way you’ll let them take her away from you without screaming. You get to visit her once when she’s six years old, and you hold her so tightly in your arms that you think that she and you might become one. You rock her in your arms and sing her to sleep. When you escape prison years later, you run and you don’t stop until you hit water. The Moroccan sea promises to drown you if you let it. You sing your way down—yalla, yalla, habibi. You lay back and float. This feeling of weightlessness as the water cradles you is the closest you will ever get to feeling airborne. You haven’t seen your daughter since she was six years old. You wonder if she has ever been to the beach. 

You forgive Saray for betraying you because she’s done it for her daughter. The two of you, circling around each other, and it comes down to your daughters. You could almost think of her as one, your Saray. Almost, because you would never wrap a seatbelt around your daughter’s throat in order to secure your freedom. 

You’d rather breathe your last than snuff the life out of your daughter. You pretend as if this is not true because this is all you have left. You brush your teeth until your gums bleed in order not to run to her side. She bows her head under the threats for a little while. Good. She should keep her head down. But you know which way the winds are blowing, so when she sneaks into the chicken house, hoping to sharpen the hollow bones of one of the birds, you give her yours, your bones and your courage both. 

She strikes. She fails. She falls. This is alright, you tell yourself. She has to learn from her mistakes. She wears a neck brace for a little while. This will teach her to keep her head high. She wears a cast on her arm and on her fingers. This will teach her to consider what’s within her reach. 

Icarus, Icarus. Fátima listens to a man call himself God and doesn’t understand how the game is played. _Do they not see the birds above them spreading and contracting (their wings)? Naught upholds them save the Beneficent. Surely He is Seer of all things._ She’ll laugh at you if you tell her to quit smoking, so you try to keep the breath in her lungs a bit longer by advising her against Sandoval. You are not a good mother. If you were, you’d be able to make her understand.

If you were a good mother, you would have given up before it came to this. This—what you ran from when you were a child. Men, and their awful, predictable evils. If you were a good mother, you would’ve seen this coming. Instead, you prevent nothing; you can only interrupt it. You beg. You get on your knees. You fold over and press your forehead to the floor and pray for the umpteenth time that the clock can be rewound. It cannot. There is only begging and then silence. 

Your daughter is eighteen and you hold her and she cries into your arms. You hold her like she’s going to fly apart in your hands. Like she’s going to shatter into a thousand pieces. The air trembles when she wails. It is not enough. You cannot fix this. You cannot go back. The only way out is forward. You hold your daughter and she leans back into you. Your daughter lets you hold her together. It is more than you deserve. 

You’d steal your daughter the sky if that was an option.

The day she’s set to be transferred, she leaves you a letter. You read it. Between the lines, if you dug deep enough, you think you would unearth love. The connection between you and her is an umbilical cord, a string of fate, a live wire. You think she could teach you a thing or two. You want to teach her everything. Your daughter thinks she could be a motherfucker just like you if she had the chance. She’s at a cliff’s edge and she’s grinning and calling your name. 

Children at play pretend to have superpowers. You have only ever wanted flight. This is not a storybook or a movie, so all you have is the human ability to run, and it is a close second—you run for your life and let the past die in the fluttering winds behind you, as a child and as a teenager and as an adult, again and again. Freedom, liberty. There’s a question of what you are running from, and there’s a different question of if there is anything you’re running toward. The questions don’t matter as much as the act of running. Lungs, heart, all the muscles of your limbs. Your feet churning up dirt, your arms surging back and forth through the air. Panting. 

When you read the letter your daughter left you, you are completely still, except for the soft rise and fall of your chest as you breathe, and your eyes as they flick back and forth across the page, taking in every word. 

The wind picks up. Something creeps across your spine. The quick air tears the letter from your hands. It slips from between your fingers and disappears. You cannot move. You are not a hollow-boned bird. You have never been more anchored down. 

Your daughter hits the ground and dies before you know she has begun to fall at all. 

Flight, you think. Flight. Flight. 

* * *

It takes more than a decade of time to creep past before the end comes for you. More than a decade, and when you kiss Macarena Ferreiro, she takes your breath away; when you’re not kissing her, she still makes breathing a little easier. You hate her. You love her. Even hungover, birdsong wakes you up in the same bed. She washes your hair and you know that as much as you wish it, neither humans nor birds are allowed to have forever.

She gives you a home when you thought you’d never have one. You give her the chance to escape and have her child. It is all you have left to give. 

When the bullets cut their swift path through the air, you are ready to answer a question. A long time ago, your daughter wrote you a letter and asked you what you would’ve named her if you could. She pulled on that thread. She would’ve sewn it into herself. You can’t hear the gunfire—can’t hear anything but the music echoing in your head, a swelling chorus, some sort of welcome, or relief, and you close your eyes, your daughter’s face imprinted behind your eyelids, and you breathe the name you chose for her like the sound of it is an invocation. Your daughter. Your Hadil.

You spread your arms like wings and let yourself fall. You won’t feel the ground catch you. 


End file.
